Businesses recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, virtual machines, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth. Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, for example by migrating data to lower-cost storage over time, reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc. Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset and look for solutions that leverage their data. For instance, data analysis capabilities, information management, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
Virtual machines may be used to provide users with access to different operating environments. Further, virtual machines may be used to provide multiple users with their own separate computing environment on a single computing system. In some cases, it is desirable for multiple instances of the virtual machines to, at least initially, have the same configuration. Thus, sometimes a virtual machine may be replicated multiple times on a computing system or across multiple computing systems.